Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 16

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Figure 7: Nirbhaya by Yaël Farber
William Burdett Coutts, the producer, says: “the message behind Nirbhaya is attached to
real life”. For him, a piece of theatre like this is so much more relevant than yet another
version of, say, As You Like It! In Yael’s vivid production, “theatre meets church” and
leaves something emblazoned on your mind in our ephemeral world. It won’t change so-
ciety overnight, but it keeps on addressing the message in a process of attitudinal change
and tolerance.
That’s political in a way, and it’s difficult to remove yourself from politics in theatre these
days. Some directors have more directly engaged with political controversy through the
medium of “verbatim” or documentary theatre. One of the finest exponents of this re-
mains Nick Kent, for many years Artistic Director of a small, but radical theatre in North
London called the Tricycle.
Perhaps, his greatest achievement (though he has many documentary theatre credits to
his name on issues from the Nuremberg Trials to the Srebrenica Massacres) as well as
his greatest success was probably around the Great Game, a series of 12 half-hour plays
about 170 years of foreign intervention in Afghanistan from 1842 to 2010—from the
Anglo-Afghan Wars, through the Russians, the CIA, the coming of the Taliban, Opera-
tion “Enduring Freedom, reconstruction, Western aid and the continuing insurgency”.
It brought together a focus on foreign policy (British, European and American) through
political debate and discourse. Premiering in 2009 in London, it then toured the US,
even to the Pentagon itself, where it was seen as an educational tool for the US military
and officialdom.
Nick has the courage to say that, even though he was against the UK/US invasion at
the time, working on the plays led him to change his perspective, in that he came to see
that the removal of the Taliban was the lesser of two evils at that time. He’s now working
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